About 1799 he was introduced to Colonel Savary, afterwards to become the Duc de Rovigo, who was then engaged on a minor commissarial mission for the Directory in Alsatian countries. Savary was evidently one of those fortunate individuals on whom the gift of sensing great events to come appears to be bestowed, and, like all of his kind, he had both the eye for useful men and the talent for attaching them. An acuminous judge of character, he was first attracted to Schulmeister by the latter's cool audacity and splendid resource in the conduct of perilous smuggling enterprises, though whether, as it is said, Savary was himself anxious to share in the very liberal profits of the smuggler's trade, is not so clear. It is certain, however, that the rising soldier and the prosperous contrabandist continued to meet and to correspond, so that in 1804, being commissioned to allure a princely _emigré_ across the French frontier, in accordance with Napoleon's resolve to put a term to conspiracies against his power by sacrificing the blood of a Bourbon, Savary at once remembered his friend Karl Schulmeister. The man who had so long and successfully eluded the excise officials at the frontier would in all probability, he argued, prove easily equal to the task of trapping a royalist on the wrong side of the international boundary-line. Entrusting the conduct of his business operations to his wife, Schulmeister visited Savary at Besançon early in March 1804. Here he was definitely instructed by the French General—Savary had been promoted to this rank in 1803—in the details of the intrigue which was to bring about the capture of the young Duc d'Enghien, whose murder had been resolved upon by the authority in Paris, its object being to strike terror into the royalist camp and clear the way towards a larger rôle for Bonaparte. Enghien was at that time a young man of thirty-two resident in the territory of the Grand Duke of Baden close to the French frontier. Proscribed like all the members of his House, he was admittedly a man in whom a taste for political intrigue counted for little, too far removed from possible succession to the throne of France to be seriously suspected of ambitious designs and, from what his contemporaries assure us, one who represented the best type of his royal race. That harshness of lot which was common to the _emigré_ of every rank in those times did not spare the young Duc, who lived in very unpretending fashion at Ettenheim, a harmless dependent on the bounty of England. Historical inquiry into details connected with the residence of the young Bourbon in Baden has entirely removed from him all suspicion of having been in any way privy to a conspiracy against the First Consul. It was the Duc's custom often to visit Strassburg, where lived a lady friend who was to prove a cruelly unconscious agent in the intrigue which brought about her lover's destruction.